Learning how to reduce photographic glare with Photoshop lets you recover details in your photos that are hidden by overly bright backlighting. For example, if you’ve photographed people standing in front of glass doors where sunlight is streaming through, the sunlight can obscure your subjects' faces. Photoshop's glare-reduction tools let the faces shine instead of the sunlight. An easy but effective approach to reducing glare with Photoshop is to use the Shadows and Highlights command with the Overlay blending mode.

Load the image you plan to reduce glare from into Photoshop. Duplicate the layer containing the image by pressing “Ctrl-J,” to perform edits without disturbing the original image. Click "Image | Adjustments | Shadows and Highlights" to display the dialog box with controls for lightening your image’s shadows and darkening its highlights.

Click the "Show More Options" checkbox button to display all the controls in the Shadows and Highlights dialog box. Drag the Amount slider right to darken the portions of the image with glare. Drag the Tonal Width slider right to increase the range of values that Photoshop should recognize as highlights. If your photo has a lot of glare, try reducing it with higher values for this control.

Drag the Radius slider left and right gradually until you see a further reduction in glare. The Radius slider specifies the size of the neighborhood surrounding a given pixel, in which Photoshop will seek the image data it needs for the highlight calculations.

Click "OK" to close the Shadows and Highlights dialog and commit to your changes. The glare in your image has decreased. If, however, your changes have knocked down the image’s contrast, continue to the step below.

Press “Ctrl-J” to duplicate the layer you edited with the Shadows and Highlights command. Click the "Blending Mode" control at the top of the Layers panel to display a list of blending modes, then click "Overlay;" this restores contrast.

Click the "Layer | Flatten Image" command to combine all layers into a single layer. Run the "Shadows and Highlights" command again to further reduce glare if needed.

Tip

On a layer set to Overlay mode, all pixels darker than 50 percent gray will darken imagery on underlying layers, and all pixels lighter than 50 percent gray will lighten imagery on underlying layers, making it an excellent tool for enhancing contrast. For even more contrast, experiment with the other Blending Mode tools: Hard Light, Vivid Light, Pin Light and Hard Mix will give you less realistic, but interesting creative effects.

About the Author

Darrin Koltow wrote about computer software until graphics programs reawakened his lifelong passion of becoming a master designer and draftsman. He has now committed to acquiring the training for a position designing characters, creatures and environments for video games, movies and other entertainment media.